Champaign County man buried on his Harley

Friday

Jan 31, 2014 at 12:01 AMFeb 1, 2014 at 3:41 PM

MECHANICSBURG, Ohio - If there was anything that stuck out about Bill Standley when he was alive, it was that he did things exactly the way he wanted to do them, usually while riding a motorcycle or a horse. Yesterday, his family and friends gave him a funeral fitting of that life. Instead of lying down in a casket, Standley sat astride his Harley-Davidson motorcycle in a casket made of plexiglass and plywood.

Laura Arenschield, The Columbus Dispatch

MECHANICSBURG, Ohio — Bill Standley was the kind of guy who lived life exactly the way he wanted, usually while riding a motorcycle or a horse.

He made sure his funeral would be exactly what he wanted, too.

Standley was buried yesterday straddling his Harley-Davidson motorcycle in a casket made of Plexiglas and plywood. It was a funeral he started planning 18 years ago, long before he could have known about the cancer that killed him on Sunday at age 82.

>> See photos from the service

“This was his dream,” said one of his daughters, Dorothy Brown.

David Vernon, director of the Skillman, McDonald and Vernon Funeral Home in Mechanicsburg, said that, when Standley first asked him about it, Vernon gave him one condition:

“I told him, ‘I have no problem doing this for you, but I don’t want you to come off that motorcycle.’?”

So Standley and his sons designed a brace that hooked into the bike and led up his back to surround his rib cage. Five years ago, Standley went before the Champaign County Board of Health, which told him he’d have to come up with a special vault and drain all the fluids out of the bike before he could be buried with it.

A company in Springfield designed a modified septic tank for a vault. He bought three plots in a cemetery outside Mechanicsburg, next to where his wife, Lorna, is buried, so there would be enough land to bury him.

Standley and his sons also designed his casket. They painted the wood bright green, like the fields Bill imagined riding through for eternity. They painted the floor black with a single white stripe, like the highway that would take him wherever he was headed after this life.

“He lived to ride,” said his son Roy Standley.

His life was the stuff of legends.

He ran away from home at 13, hopping a train and heading west to live on ranches and learn rodeo. He came back to Ohio a couple of years later, but only because he learned his parents thought he was dead.

“He knew how hard his mother would take that,” Brown said. “And he said he just couldn’t do that to her.”

By then, though, Standley had fallen in love with the road, and it wasn’t long before he was gone again.

He finally settled down for good in Mechanicsburg, though his version of settling meant motorcycle groups and long rides with Lorna, and singing George Jones songs in bars. He was blunt with everyone he met, and he cussed so much he earned the nickname “Toilet Mouth.”

But he was also loyal, and gentle with his family and friends. After Lorna died in 2003, he kept a photo of the two of them in a frame on a table next to his recliner, making sure it faced the chair so he could always see it.

“He was very old-school,” said his other daughter, Theresa Adams. And he taught his kids — two daughters, two sons — to live by a code:

“You don’t lie. You don’t steal,” Adams said. “If you can’t get what you want by working, you don’t deserve to have it.”

He also taught anyone who would listen that things didn’t always have to be what everyone expected them to be.

Take the bike he’s buried on. It’s a 1967 Harley-Davidson that he bought new and fixed when a woman crashed into the front of it with her car. He painted it a brilliant metallic turquoise out of colors he mixed himself.

He wanted to be able to say the bike had everything on it but the kitchen sink, said friend Terry Rittenhouse, so he went to the hardware store and bought bathroom fixtures and put them on the bike as finials.

“He never did anything regular,” Rittenhouse said.

So it was with his funeral.

Yesterday morning, a crane lowered his homemade casket into the ground. Bill Purk, an old friend and musician, pulled out a guitar and the crowd serenaded Standley one last time with an old George Jones song he was famous for singing in a local bar: He Stopped Loving Her Today.